the quality of mercy
by yoursweetbabybrother
Summary: In the fallout of the battle of Crait, Rey struggles to become the hero the Resistance needs while Kylo finds himself the unwilling leader of a broken regime. Somewhere between their realities, both strive desperately for control of a connection that pulls at them from across the stars. post-TLJ/reylo/slow burn/eventual smut.


_hello, this is an angsty slow-burn reylo mess that picks up a short time after TLJ. uh, hang in there i guess? maybe leave me a review or two so i know you're out there._

 _enjoy. or don't.  
 **-the author**_

* * *

i.

* * *

Rey jerked awake with a snort, back stiff and collarbone aching from where she had slumped over the sharp corner of an upturned supply crate. The single shaft of sun she had been using to light her work at the makeshift table had long since disappeared, her messy scribbles and schematics now blurred in the center by a small patch of her own drool. She wrinkled her nose down at the spot of moisture, wiping at the corner of her mouth.

A shiver pulled through her as she pushed herself upright, and she hugged her arms close with work-worn hands. The air here on Arda-1 had turned colder with the sinking sun, heat fleeing from the stone walls around her. She had almost forgotten how _cold_ deserts could be at night, all her memories of Jakku filled with searing sun and burning sands.

Rolling up her notes, she pulled herself to her feet, careful to avoid the hastily stacked and catalogued piles of scrap all around the small room. Observing it all again as she picked her way through to the door, she remembered just how little of it she had found that could be of any use to them at all—most of the parts could be broken down into patching metal, at best. Her mouth tightened. She needed to talk to General Organa, to see if the rebels had managed to get any more of the inner doors open and found anything of better use, else they would soon be out of food, fuel, and time.

Keeping the dirty scrap of paper clenched in her teeth as she tightened the tie around her greasy brown hair, Rey exited the tiny scrap room and began to weave her way up to the front of the base and the warmth of the mess. It was late, judging by the hints of starlight peering through the occasional gaps in the high natural ceilings. She had certainly missed dinner by now, but with any luck, Finn had saved her a pack of protein and polystarch, as usual.

Her stomach grumbled, dissatisfied, and a sigh escaped her. Back to the desert. Back to rations, scrapping, surviving. _Once a scavenger, always a scavenger._

With Leia's guidance, they had found their way to a temporary refuge on this desert world, Arda-1, in the far reaches of the outer rim. There was an ancient rebel base deep beneath the planet's surface, an abandoned ruin where The General hoped to recover from the First Order's devastating assault and create room for their own, far from its eyes and influence. She had called the old base the Gauntlet, and it had certainly been a trial to get there.

Rey had managed to thread the Millenium Falcon over rough red sands and down into the earth, delving through jagged rocks and canyons that twisted like crooked fingers to reach the half collapsed entrance of the wasted base below. It had taken them a whole day just to hike down the narrow, natural incline of the earth to reach the initial blast doors, and another just to get them operating again. Once inside, they found the base in no better shape than the barren, battleworn planet above. The red sand had seeped _everywhere_ in here, dusty and clinging, and parts of the ceiling had collapsed completely, open to the searing sun above. Rey didn't have to lift any rocks here to know that that none of the crushed communications equipment would be able to function, even if she did push away all the debris. They were alone out here, and just as it had been on Crait, the base was completely gutted when they took stock of it. Many of the doors they managed to tease open held nothing but more rock, more scrap, more empty, sand-filled rooms. Clearing them out and setting up anything that could resemble a base was tedious work, with so few of them left, and the days were mostly filled with tension and silence, even in the temporary mess.

When she emerged through the rusty hatch to the sandy canteen, ancient mechanisms squealing shut behind her, Finn was already bounding across the room, eyes bright, smile wide.

"I've been looking for you everywhere—we found something amazing!" he called. "Where have you been?"

It was contagious, his smile, and she found one stretching across her own face despite herself: something good had finally happened, she could feel it. Rey picked up her step to meet him halfway, their arms reaching out across the last of the distance. They grasped each other by both forearms.

"What did you find?" she asked, desperate for it. He shook his head.

"Even better," his grin stretched impossibly wider. "Let me show you."

He took her hand, and though they both knew she could outpace him easily Rey let him lead her in a clumsy half-run down the hall beyond the mess, excitement and anticipation building in her as she felt it in him. Finn had to have found something _really_ good. She was beaming, she couldn't wait to see.

They wound deep into the base before he stopped her, just short of a partially open blast door, and she was keeping so close at his heels that she nearly stepped right into him. A team of techs were still milling outside, working at the fried old control panel with hands and tools alike to try and fully dislodge the door. Beyond the gap, she could just see a sliver of artificial light slicing over rocks and sand, a ceiling that stretched high out of view. She tried to lean around Finn to see more of the room, but he moved his body in front of her again, grasping her shoulders, eyes wickedly bright.

"Okay," he said, excited, "now close your eyes."

"Close—what?" she scoffed, but he interrupted her with a hand pushed over her face like a warm blindfold. She dodged his fingers, grunting in protest, reaching to shove him aside. "Finn, that's enough, just tell me—"

Wielding both hands this time, he lunged for her eyes with flattened palms again. "Close 'em! You're not gonna believe this—oh, come on, it'll be a surprise!"

"Absolutely not!" she cried, still trying to slap his hands away from her, but a shout echoed from beyond the door and brought them both to a pause.

"Finn!" Finn pulled his hands away, half turning. A little louder, now, closer to the door: "Finn, is that you?"

Poe Dameron's face popped around the small, crescent opening of the broken blast door. He scoffed when he saw them, still silently struggling against each other, and beckoned impatiently.

"Okay, enough with the theatrics, Finn," he sounded exasperated, but there was a smile catching at the corner of his mouth as he waved his hand through the door at the pair of them. "Just, you know, let her in here to take a look already." He turned away from the opening, his voice drifting as he went. It echoed in the high, hollow chamber beyond the door as he called back to them. "I wanna know what she thinks."

"Fine," Finn conceded, but he was smiling, too, as he turned to her. "Come on."

She grinned at him, following his path past the grumbling technicians, and found herself on the other side of the door, blinking in a strange light.

Whatever crew had first cracked into the room had managed to slip a single circadian lamp through the slim crack in the door, its stand broken off to accommodate the slender gap. Half on its back and propped crookedly against a slab of rock on the floor, the light was throwing such curious shadows up and across the entire atrium that it took her a moment to understand what she was meant to see.

She squinted, putting a hand out to block the lamplight from her eyes, and the air left her lungs.

"Oh, Finn," she breathed, full of awe and some other emotion she couldn't quite describe.

There had been a partial cave in of this room, the domed ceiling high above them ripped half open to the stars. Large, red rocks had crashed down in the collapse, splintering into smaller fragments that crunched underfoot. An ancient, battered land cruiser had been totally ruined by the event, pipes and parts scattered everywhere… but _beside it_ , rusted out, ravaged by time, but miraculously, defiantly intact: a single X-wing.

Poe pushed between her and Finn, pulling the three of them together with an arm around them both.

"What do you think, Rey?" he asked, smiling down at her. "Finn says you're pretty good with this stuff...can you help me fix it up?"

She grinned widely, unable to contain her excitement. Her mind was already thrumming with possibility, thinking about where to begin, what to take apart first. _Once a scavenger, always a scavenger._

"Yeah," she returned, giddy. "I think I could do that."

Poe squeezed her shoulder, and the three of them sat there staring up at it together in the strange light of the ravaged hangar, feeling something like hope for the first time since their frenzied escape from Crait.

* * *

Deep in the outer rim, the dark obelisk of Retribution II cut a hulking silhouette across the swampy planet of Taul far below, idling steady in its orbit.

It was late in the ship's day cycle, and the hallways of the massive destroyer were near empty, circadian lights dimmed to a dull amber glow. Kylo Ren stalked along them with purposeful strides, a lone figure in the artificial night. There was a practiced ease in his fingers as he reached out, and at his gesture a recess slid open a few paces ahead. The smooth black wall hissed open to reveal the bright white light of a service lift, its glow filling the darkened corridor.

He stepped inside, eyes downcast, shoulders tense. Without touch or word, the lift thrummed to action around him, mechanism sliding shut as the familiar feeling of descent gathered somewhere behind his navel.

It had been two standard weeks since the failed assault on Crait, and at his command the First Order had wasted little time amassing him a small fleet with which to skate through the outer rim, searching for any trace of the Millenium Falcon and her ghost crew of Resistance fighters. They had dispatched scouts to whatever seedy satellite outposts and mining stations they could find out here in the rim, but this far from the core colonies people would say just about anything for a few credits. It made gathering any useful intelligence difficult, time consuming, and usually fruitless.

He shifted his weight, uneasy. This close to deep space, even the force was quiet, and its silence disturbed him. His connection to his power had been unbalanced, thrown out of focus since their departure from the salty planet—since the last time he had seen the scavenger, staring down at him with fire in her eyes from aboard his father's ship. His connection to _her_ had seemed to close itself off in that moment as well, her fury pulling her away from him like the hatch she raised between them, a solid and unyielding boundary.

The feel of her had dwindled so much over the last two weeks that he had found himself wondering if his master's final admission had held some truth after all, if the bond between them had only been a thing of Snoke's own creation, a cruel and final trick. But if Kylo calmed his breath and focused, reaching, he could _just_ feel her light, subtle and steady. The heady warmth of it dragged against the edge of his subscious, always eluding him, always just out of reach. A surge of impatience rippled through him, and he exhaled harshly.

He needed to find her, to find the Resistance, to snuff it out—and soon. In the wake of his humiliated defeat at the battle of Crait, many of his officers were beginning to question his competence, both as a master of the force and as their newly risen Supreme Leader. He could feel it from them, see it in their minds as clearly as if they had spoken it to him: Kylo Ren was unfit to lead, a foolish boy, a failed apprentice, _weak_.

His gloved fists clenched, lights above him flickering. The elevator groaned, sinking lower.

All of these frustrations had only been exacerbated by Hux, of course. The general had somehow managed to grow into an even larger thorn in his side. The past few days in particular, his posthumous reverence for Snoke had become a source of constant annoyance, and there was scarcely a moment Kylo spent away from his chambers that the General was not hovering at his back, always questioning, sidetalking, throwing around insults disguised as ideations. Kylo took to his rooms early and often just to escape, but he rarely found sleep there. His chambers, and the shadows that whispered to him in the darkness of them, brought him little comfort. He had instead found new refuge in sleepless nights and the cool quiet of the engineering deck, deep in the heart of the ship. It was the one place that Hux seemed unwilling or unable to follow him, whether by ignorance or aversion.

The lift pulled to a slow stop, doors sliding open with a soft hiss, and Kylo Ren crossed the short walkway to the main bay in three long steps. As usual, he found the platform mostly abandoned. Two petty officers scurried to attention as he ducked through the open door, shifting nervously in his presence.

"Leave," his voice was terse, quiet, and they obeyed. He felt their fear as they moved quickly past him, and Kylo waited until he heard the door to the lift hiss shut behind them before he stepped towards the center of the engineering deck, shoulders sloping. It was quiet down here, the quietest part of the ship by far, especially this late in the day cycle, only a dull and constant thrum to hint at the machinery working so closely by. He stared at the engines through the transparisteel barrier that looked down over them, all eight still barrelling away to maintain the ship's vital functions, even as they idled gently in orbit.

His fingers curled into fists. He needed to find her, the scavenger. He needed to find a way to reopen the connection between them, to put an end to all this, to _her_ , once and for all.

 _One way or the other._

Black fabric pooled around him onto the smooth metal grating below as he lowered himself to the floor, long legs folding to cross beneath him. His gaze was still, breath purposed. Through the partition, he contemplated the arrhythmic pulsing of the ion pistons, energy and steam arcing and rippling silently over and between the massive machines. He thought about what a cacophony it must be in there, past the transparisteel, what it must sound like, smell like. Kylo closed his eyes. He could hear the hiss of the steam, the steady chuck of the mechanisms keeping them on course, the high whine of the reactor within. The air in here was electric, it tasted metallic on his tongue, made his teeth ache and his hair stand—and the _heat_ of it all! The damp, uncomfortable, steaming heat, the sting of hot metal and the pulse of static energy, painful and sharp in his lungs—it was too much, the noise and the heat and the heavy, biting air. He couldn't breathe, couldn't see, the thick steam choking him and burning his eyes. Kylo Ren fell forward onto his hands and knees, gasping, eyes squeezed shut, desperate for breath, for relief, an end to this terrible feeling—

Everything stilled, and he opened his eyes to cool, quiet darkness. The infinite black surrounding him was blinding in its totality, and for a moment he found himself stunned by it...and then he felt it, like a phantom of familiarity, something just out of reach. He closed his eyes again, reaching out with his energy, pushing it into the dark, searching for the feeling with seeking tendrils. It flickered like candlelight at the edge of his awareness, and he breathed hard, desperate to find it.

"Show me," he demanded, but the force was silent, unyielding. He summoned his strength and focused, pushing harder, pressing forward into the darkness with his power, hand outstretched. His heart pounded in his ears, the sound echoing strangely in his head and in the dark. _Show me._

For a moment, nothing happened, and he grit his teeth against the familiar disappointed rage rising in his chest, threatening to break over him with violent consequence—and then there was a shift in the force, like a ripple over water, and the darkness split open with blinding brightness, warm and absolute. Blinking against it, Kylo stilled, breath catching.

 _Rey._

The name slipped through him like a curse. He knew the feel of her by now, her force, and it filled him with a culmination of wretched feeling that threatened to tear him apart. Hand shaking, energy surging, he reached out again, straining for the connection, for her.

 _Let me in,_ he breathed, desperation still and quiet in the glow of her light. _Let me see you._

He felt her shift toward the connection, toward him, and something deep beneath his ribcage shifted in response. Silence hung for a moment, he held the air in his lungs, and then a whisper drifted through the force, sighing all around him, warped and distorted by the strange space. He closed his eyes, focused on it, and it came together with a sudden, acerbic clarity:

 _Not today,_ _ **Kylo Ren**_ _._

It spat his name like a weapon, like venom, and Kylo found himself thrown violently back into the quiet thrum of the main engineering bay, panting. There was sweat beaded on his brow, and he swiped it away impatiently, fists clenching against his knees, blood pumping hotly in his ears. Once again, she had eluded him, escaped from his grasp at the last second—a filthy scavenger from the filthy desert, managing to thwart him at every turn. His fingers twitched, itching for his saber, but he suppressed the urge with long, shaking breaths wracked with tension. He pushed himself to his full height with a growl, violent energy threatening to spill over him, and stalked back towards the lift. With a flick of his fingers, it opened for him willingly.

Kylo Ren stepped inside, quiet rage rising, her message throbbing through his mind like a fresh wound. No, he could not find her today. But one day soon, he would.

He had to.


End file.
